Batman: Haunted Knight

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Before The Long Halloween, Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale brought us Madness.

By Hilary Goldstein

Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale have become one of the great writer/artist duos in DC history. With a string of hits, including The Long Halloween and Dark Victory it can be easy to forget their roots. The two have been working together, on and off, for years. Before their mammoth work on the above-mentioned books, the pair offered a different prestige-format book each Halloween for three straight years from 1993-1995: "Fears", "Madness" and "Ghosts". These three tales have been collected into one book. But are the early works worth it or is Batman: Haunted Knight a waste of money?

"Fears" features a perfect Halloween villain, the Scarecrow. However, the tale really has little to do with Halloween. The Scarecrow and his crew have been knocking out power grids in Gotham and then looting in the dark. That, of course, is about to come to an end thanks to the Batman. Running parallel to Batman's battle is a story of Bruce Wayne's newest love interest. The joy in this story is discovering that the Scarecrow is the less-frightening of the two. As for Sale's art, there are a couple of pages that are striking.

"Madness" follows the Mad Hatter, who's gone off his nut and has begun kidnapping children on Halloween to assemble his own tea party. The Alice of the group is played by a very young Barbara Gordon, who's disobeyed were adoptive father and gone out to trick-or-treat. Though this story is somewhat straightforward, Loeb mixes in some depth with a childhood flashback to the early life of Bruce Wayne. This is one of the few stories to give any decent credibility to Mad Hatter's insanity.

Lastly is "Ghosts", perhaps the only bad story the duo of Loeb and Sale have told. I'm certain the quality of "Ghosts" wasn't the reason it became the last in the series, but it's justifiable. A poor parallel to "A Christmas Carol", the final leg of the Haunted Knight doesn't ring true. At least the pair redeemed themselves years later with another Halloween tale.

Though the first two stories in this collection are good reads, I wouldn't recommend this trade too highly. Sure, it's Loeb and Sale and good stuff, but it's nowhere near the level of their later work. You likely wont' be haunted by these stories or drawn back to them often. Certainly not enough to warrant a $15 purchase.